which, considering he began his poem by invoking the help of those same gods, seems ungrateful, not to say ungracious. The last stanza is quite simply a doxology:
“Thou one, and two, and three, eterne in life, That reignest aye in three, and two, and one,”
just such an accomplished and charming doxology as might be expected from Chaucer--but, all the same, a doxology. To such strange uses did poets lend their muse when they loved paynimry and were horribly afraid of it too.
Freed from the overshadowing of a wrath to come, Milton was able to concentrate upon poetic excellence, as indeed he did. You will look far before you find so serene and beautiful a close to a long poem as that of _Paradise Lost._ Pity and terror contend in the last paragraph. When the Archangel with his burning brand, and the attendant Cherubim, faces in the fire, descend and take possession of Eden, terror holds us; but then, pity:
“They, looking back, all th’ eastern side beheld Of Paradise so late their happy seat....”
They were mortal, that pair. Mortals have short memories, but long hopes. So--
“Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide. They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way.”
The dream was over. Life began its “search for rest.” Beautiful indeed, and exactly observed.
I must here leave the Muse with barely a glance at the Victorians, which suffices nevertheless to reveal that they adopted the rhetorical device of the peroration. Tennyson uses it in _In Memoriam_ and _Maud_, Browning in _The Ring and the Book_, Swinburne, very finely, in _Tristram of Lyonesse_, and very characteristically too with his usual catchword. I don’t know how many considerable poems there may be of Swinburne’s which do not end with the word “sea,” but believe that the fingers of one hand would be too many for them. In _Sordello_ Browning chose the mediæval colophon, the _Ci falt la geste_, when he shut down his long enigma with
“Who would has heard Sordello’s story told,”
and laid himself open to the easy retort that it was not at all true. But the grandest finale of our times remains to be told: Tennyson’s closing lines of _Idylls of the King_. I do not refer to the Envoy, which is only a postscript to the Dedication. I mean rather the end of “The Passing of Arthur”: Sir Bedivere on the shore, “straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand” to see the barge out of sight, “down that long water opening on the deep”; to see it go,